Although applicable in principal to any radio frequency system, the present invention and its underlying problem will be hereinafter described in combination with testing of a wireless communication system.
In modern wireless communication systems the amount of data during a communication between single devices increases. For this purpose, the bandwidth and the frequency of the radio frequency signals for communication increases, too.
For testing such communication systems, appropriate hardware for high-frequency applications and the broadband applications is required. However, appropriate hardware components such as broadband analogue to digital converters or digital to analog converters are expensive. Thus, the costs for an appropriate test hardware are very high.
Against this background, the problem addressed by the present invention is to provide an apparatus and method for receiving signals, in particular high-frequency and/or broadband signals which can be realized with lower costs. Moreover, the present invention aims to provide an apparatus and method for generating signals, in particular high-frequency and/or broadband signals which can be generated by hardware of lower costs.